– I had a lot of people who said to me, after they saw the play,
people who were not Black, who said, “Boy, I just really
understood that nightmare, “every parent’s nightmare, “of waking up in the middle of the night “and not knowing where your teenager is.” That is a universal experience for all parents of adolescents. (soul music) Well, I play a woman
named Kendra Ellis-Connor, and I’m a mom of an 18 year old boy, and I am recently separated
from my White husband. And the whole film takes place
in 90 minutes, real time, in the lobby of a police precinct, because we are desperately
looking for our 18 year old son who has just gone missing,
and we can’t find him. I feel like the most important idea that’s being covered in this material, in this play, now film, is our ability to really see each other and hear each other. And I feel like that’s
so important right now because I think a lot of
us when we hear somebody express an idea that’s
different from our own in this political
environment, we shut them out. We turn the channel or
we walk out of the room or we refused to engage. And I feel like right now more than ever we really need to be
listening to each other and really hearing each other, and that’s what the play is. I feel like the play,
a now television event, is really a prayer, that we all stop and just take a little
bit of time to really listen to each other, because you have four
very different people with very different points of view, saying things that we may say in private but we’re not really
saying in public spaces, and we hear them. And I think in the hearing them what I found from audiences is that we find ourselves
having commonalities with characters that we
didn’t think we would have commonalities with. And I think that’s profound. I was a producer for the play and now for the film, for Netflix, and when I saw our first
cut of American Son at the editor’s bay, I
immediately turned to our director and said, “How did we do
this eight times a week?” I can barely watch this. (laughs) I think it’s so captivating
to see this couple in this really intense
night of their lives, but to live it again and
again really took a toll on all of us, I think. When I wasn’t on set, I was
hanging out with my kids and my husband, and I feel like, in many ways, the play and the film, it was the experience of dropping myself into one woman’s nightmare, and so when I would come
out of that nightmare, I really, really was in
the joy of my own life. (soul music)